A Information to Constructing a Faculty Calendar That Maximizes Attendance

As district leaders confront persistently excessive ranges of absenteeism, they’ve put extra thought into planning college calendars, strategically scheduling lengthy weekends, workers workdays, vacation breaks, and spirit weeks to attenuate dips in attendance all year long. And whereas not a silver bullet, leaders say such efforts might be a part of an total technique to hold extra college students in class extra of the time.

Listed below are six suggestions for planning college calendars with attendance in thoughts.

1. Think about including extra lengthy weekends

It might appear to be an oxymoron to provide college students extra days off in hopes of constructing stronger attendance habits, however some districts are attempting it. The intention is to handle a frequent criticism because the COVID pandemic: Mother and father are way more lax about absenteeism than they was, main extra households to skip college for outings like a household reunion or a visit to Disney World.

So some districts have peppered a couple of further days off round breaks or in stretches of the calendar with fewer holidays. If everybody has the day without work, academics can hold college students on the identical web page of their classes. Random, unexcused absences from particular person college students make that a lot tougher, placing strain on academics to produce lacking assignments.

The Pasco County, Fla., district took such an method, including four-day weekends referred to as “mini breaks” to its calendar in October, February, and April.

“We will encourage our college students and households to take their mini-trips or holidays on these lengthy weekends as a substitute of taking off tutorial days,” an official mentioned throughout a faculty board assembly lined by native information station WSTP. “So we’re going to attempt to market that to our households as, ‘Listed below are some mini-breaks all year long in order that if you wish to take a while off, let’s do it then and never miss college.’”

2. Be aware of holidays—and the times earlier than and after

Think about providing days off on days if you would possibly count on excessive ranges of absences. For instance, add Friday as a day without work if New 12 months’s Day falls on a Thursday.

In Palm Seaside County, Fla., for instance, colleges are off the entire week of Thanksgiving.

“When Thanksgiving break is shorter, directors argued that pupil attendance falls, trainer attendance, too,” the Palm Seaside Publish reported. “There’s additionally the argument {that a} shortened week isn’t usually academically productive. Lastly, some argued that the boon of per week off at Thanksgiving was teacher-recruiting device.”

And ensure your calendar aligns with the range of your enrollment. Districts with altering demographics, comparable to rising Asian American and Jewish populations, have opted to provide college students the day without work on holidays like Diwali, Eid al-Fitr, Lunar New 12 months, and Rosh Hashanah.

Leaders say recognizing the vacations helps offset absences from observant college students and helps to construct a way of belief and belonging amongst their households, which is linked to stronger attendance and engagement.

“We will’t honor all holidays as a result of we’d be going to highschool year-round,” Todd Bauer, the superintendent of the North Penn district in Pennsylvania, advised Training Week lately. North Penn added Diwali to its calendar in 2021. “We will’t be all issues to all individuals, however that doesn’t imply we shouldn’t attempt to domesticate a neighborhood and tradition the place everybody appears like they’re cared for.”

3. Use staff-development days strategically

Think about shifting staff-development days to occasions when pupil engagement and attendance is likely to be low, say the day after Halloween.

North Penn colleges managed to keep away from extra tutorial interruptions by scheduling two of its eight staff-development days on newly acknowledged holidays.

4. Think about “no testing” days

Some districts put aside days of their calendars after they advise towards or prohibit academics from scheduling checks or main assignments. These days could also be holidays or the weekend after homecoming. The intention is to construct calendars round college students’ pure engagement patterns and to mitigate the results of low engagement.

5. Get inventive to encourage attendance

College students’ don’t at all times have a single, identifiable cause for skipping college, researchers say. As a substitute, many have a scale of their heads that weighs causes to remain house towards what they’d miss by being absent.

Faculty leaders can add actions to the “what they’d miss” facet of the dimensions by strategically scheduling spirit days, assemblies, and artistic actions on days when attendance and engagement would possibly in any other case be low. For instance, some principals throw a pumpkin off the roof the Monday after Halloween. And lots of districts plan pajama days close to the tip of the college yr and A centesimal-day-of-school celebrations within the center to provide college students extra causes to indicate up.

Partaking classes may assist ease college students again into routines after breaks. At one college, academics used the chocolate college students had collected trick-or-treating as a jumping-off level for a long-term, multidisciplinary studying mission that included ideas starting from world politics, economics, and geography to literature, knowledge assortment, and botany, as this Training Week opinion piece describes.

“Simply after Halloween, they dug into their trick-or-treat baggage to gather baseline knowledge on the most typical varieties of chocolate sweet bars—the makers and the elements,” wrote former trainer Jessica Wooden. “Sixth graders have been stunned to note the identical producers time and again (Mars, Nestle, Kraft) and that the widespread ingredient (together with sugar) was cacao. Who have been these producers? The place have been they getting their elements? College students’ questions have been many, and we had totally ignited their curiosity.”

The academics used tales and artifacts they’d collected on a grant-funded journey to West Africa, the place a lot of the world’s chocolate originates, to show about cacao farming, sweet manufacturing, and West African tradition.

6. Design attendance messaging across the calendar

Districts ought to adapt planning, occasions, and messaging about attendance for various occasions within the college yr, specialists suggest.

Attendance Works, a nationwide group that promotes attendance methods, presents planning calendars for varsity and district attendance groups to plan for messaging about vital info like when to remain house throughout chilly and flu season, the right way to tackle college anxiousness initially of the yr, and the right way to focus on absences throughout parent-teacher conferences.

The planning calendars account for whole-school methods, comparable to planning end-of-year traditions to spice up attendance, and focused interventions for college students who want extra help, comparable to teaching about transitions to center college or highschool on the finish of the yr.